Spinster Who Bea Leopard

Manawatu Times, Volume 62, Issue 44, 22 February 1937, Page 11

Spinster Who Bea Leopard

REMARKABLE VICTORIAN LADY Mary Henrietta Kingsley, niece of Charles Kingsley, was one of the most remarkable women of any age—a Victorian gentlewoman who became an Afrcian explorer, crossing territory no white foot had trod (says a writer in John o’ London). Her advent into staid Victorian society was literally an eruption, for when still a child her father’s talk of military engineering so inspired her that she got hold of his store of gunpowder and made a mine in the back garden, driving a tunnol under a largo butt of liquid manure. When she sprang her mine the family washing was hanging out to dry; it blew thq entire butt over sheets, blankets, lacy undergarments. At an age when other little girls played with dolls her favonirte pets were fighting cocks. Her taste in literature skipped Uncle Charle’s ’Water Babies’ and lighted on things like the ‘English Mechanic'; and Lockyer’a ‘Solar Physic*’ In 1886, when she was 24 and her parents moved. to Cambridge, she eagerly took up tho study of mathematics and other branches of tho exact sciences.

Ono would expect a young woman of that calibre to go far. At 30, after the loss of hor father and mother, she sailed for West Africa iu a cargo boat. The reason —her father had collected data on early regligion and law, except that concerning the African tribes, ffhxl she wanted to gather additional facts for the book.

This prim lady dressed for the bush much as she had dressed in Cambridge, with stout boots and skirt. Tho skirts saved her from severe injury when sho fell into a leopard trap pit. One night 1 in camp she was aroused by a terrific fight between a couple of native dogs and a leopard. The leopard was winning, so sho flung a couple of stools at the brute, who thereupon turned on her. Sho flung again—this time an earthenware Water cooler, which broke on his head. He spat, yowled, auu "went for bush ono time."

Another time, she released a leopard which had been caught in a native trap. Instead of leaping off, it stalked up, paw by paw, and sniffed at her clothes. Mary was trembling inwardly, knowing that to shriek for help would mean a quick, powerful leap of the great cat, with its steely claws scratching the life out of her. She looked at it, and, in the accents of Cambridge, exclaimed scornfully but quietly: "Go home, you fool I” The beast stopped in its tracks, turned tail, and slunk off on silent pads. She did not know it, but a native belonging to one of the wildest cannibal tribes had silently watched that little drama. He went back to his village with a talc of a miracle: ‘The White Woman speaks, and the jungle does her bidding." From that time she became an object of veneration among the natives. On another occasion she found herself alono on a small island With a big hippopotamus. In terror as to his next move, sho "walked up behind the brute and scratched his ear with her parasol. He beamed as only a hippopotamus could beam, moved his enormous head from side to side in gratitude, and, after a few minutes, waddled peacefully into the water." Yet, back in England, she was terrified of hansom cabs, detested bicycles, and was timidly unhappy on top of a horse bus. . . In 1900 she went to South Africa, ameliorated the lot of the Boer prisoners at Simon's Town, and died there.